Dinant is a small city in the Walloon region of Belgium, on the Meuse River. It is one of those otherwise obscure places (Fort Pillow, Lidice, My Lai) that has lent its name to an atrocity. On August 23, 1914, in the early weeks of World War I, German troops slaughtered almost seven-hundred Belgian civilians – men, women, children – and burned down most of the buildings in the city. In her “Dinant, August 1914” (Arm in Arm, 2022), Catharine Savage Brosman describes the massacre as “foreshadowing the trenches.” True, but it also foreshadows the second round of German barbarism less than thirty years later.  “Late June ’14: an Austrian archduke died by an assassin’s hand. A pawn, that’s all. The chessboard changed; alliances and pride moved pieces toward an end none could forestall.   “Mid-August, Feast of the Assumption: war now two weeks old. In Belgium, on the Meuse, Dinant had been contested twice before. This time the Teuton forces would not lose.   “French fighters occupied the Citadel, when Jägers, with machine guns, overcame them, leaving one-half dead. The stronghold fell again that very day—a deadly game   “foreshadowing the trenches. Germans massed Their troops, secured pontoons. First, raids at night. The 23rd, they crossed: blast after blast, grenades and cannon, houses fired, to spite   “resistance. In one month, a thousand dead civilians, pillage, executions, rape, two libraries in ruins—and ahead four years of butchery, with no escape.   “To what avail were pacts, with Europe, torn, gouged out, perhaps nine million soldiers killed? Though time grew late, the peace was never born. War is the poisoned fruit that we have willed.”   In The Times on September 2, 1914, in response to Dinant and other German atrocities – known collectively as “The Rape of Belgium” – Rudyard Kipling published “For All We Have and Are”:   “Our world has passed away, In wantonness o’erthrown. There is nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone!”

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“April 17 [in 1778], being Good Friday, I waited on Johnson, as usual.”  As was the custom in school when I was growing up, I learned history as a rollcall of great men and memorized dates. “Abraham Lincoln” and “December 7, 1941” plugged leaks in my obligatory knowledge and that was the end of it. History was static, fixed like a photograph. To know it was an act of memorization, not moral imagination. Only later, as “History” and personal history blurred, and as Gibbon’s lessons slowly sank in, did I become intimate with the past. The minutiae of individual lives seemed not only more interesting but more charged with personal significance. “They” became “us.” Reading history is not unlike reading a great novel, say Daniel Deronda or Nostromo, fiction containing history and the lives of men and women not entirely unlike us. Cynthia Ozick recently referred to “the long and intertwined corridors of the past, and a conviction that a mind shorn of history is vacuous.”   Above, Boswell begins recounting yet another meeting with Dr. Johnson, 247 years ago. It’s a holy day:   “I observed at breakfast that although it was a part of his abstemious discipline on this most solemn fast, to take no milk in his tea, yet when Mrs. Desmoulins inadvertently poured it in, he did not reject it. I talked of the strange indecision of mind, and imbecility in the common occurrences of life, which we may observe in some people. JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, I am in the habit of getting others to do things for me.’ BOSWELL. ‘What, Sir! have you that weakness?’ JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir. But I always think afterwards I should have done better for myself.’”   A history of religious practice and a good man’s tolerance and moral scruples is casually present in that passage. An exchange on travel writing follows. Boswell tells Johnson that A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) contains much he possessed even before leaving London:   “JOHNSON. ‘Why yes, Sir, the topicks were; and books of travels will be good in proportion to what a man has previously in his mind; his knowing what to observe; his power of contrasting one mode of life with another. As the Spanish proverb says, ‘He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.’ So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.’ BOSWELL. ‘The proverb, I suppose, Sir, means, he must carry a large stock with him to trade with.’ JOHNSON. ‘Yes, Sir.’”   That’s says volumes about the worthlessness of most “travel writing,” as opposed to the work of Charles Doughty, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Zbigniew Herbert and V.S. Naipaul. Among other qualities, their travel writing attends closely to history. After attending Good Friday services at St. Clement’s, Boswell recounts the chance reunion of Johnson with an old acquaintance, Oliver Edwards, from his Pembroke Colleges days. It’s a marvelous passage and I’ve written about it before. Johnson recalls drinking ale with Edwards and sharing lines of poetry. In reply, Edwards utters his “deathless remark”:   “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”   Apart from Boswell’s literary gifts, think of the raw historical knowledge gleaned from a close reading and rereading of his Life of Johnson.   [Speaking of history, my youngest son, David Kurp, a senior at Rice University, has just had a paper, “Limits, Liberty, and Localism: The Shared Vision of Burke and Tocqueville,” published in the Spring 2025 issue of Rice Historical Review.]

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The two great tasks of the creative life are keeping failure from breaking the spirit and keeping success from ossifying it. If you do attain success by the weft and warp of hard work and luck, it takes great courage to resist becoming a template of yourself that replicates whatever has garnered you acclaim in the past, continually lowering and lowering your willingness to take risks, narrowing and narrowing your locus of curiosity — that elemental building block of creativity. In 2005, while working as a designer at a branding agency, Debbie Millman — my onetime partner, now closest friend… read article